Death! Death! Death! The obsession overwhelmed church life from every side. Of course, there was some life, in a rather subdued sense, but that was only because in order to get to be dead, you needed to be alive to some degree beforehand. There was the nativity, for instance—the divine creation of life; which inspired Herod to send his soldiers out to hack all newborn babies to death. There was the Passover—and another pile of dead babies. Right through the sermons and lessons and Sunday School, the procession of plagues and disasters and massacres and even more massacres went on ceaselessly—Moses drowning half of the population of Egypt in the Red Sea; Joshua attempting genocide on a scale to rival Hitler; Samson squashing hundreds under the rubble of the fallen temple; the mass slaughterings of Saul and David.
    Even Christ’s miracles were short-term solutions and futile—all those he cured or raised from the dead eventually died anyway. When it wasn’t about death it was about being sick. Page upon page of God demanding retribution, of misshapen lepers, plagues of frogs and boils and rivers running with blood, and endless human sacrifice. And not only was it about the death (by the proverbial ton) of other people, but about your own death as well. I thought long and hard about this. The idea behind going to church in the first place was not solely for the purpose of making my Sundays miserable, nor to fill in the time while the roast browned in the oven. It was about preparing for what happened to you after you, yourself, was dead. Shudder!     
    The situation seemed to be that depending on how you behaved on Sunday morning, either you went to one place or the other when you died. A discomforting thought, for I tried every Sunday to evade my spiritual responsibilities and roundly despised the whole business, so it was perfectly plain which way I was going. Hell, no worries. Horrible place. Worse even that the ancient state of Israel as the Old Testament described it. Hot and cruel and very uncomfortable and where you weren’t allow to have or do any of the things you liked. It was going to be just plain awful—never did a boy have such a will to live as I did. Except, I also had doubts...